In classical content distribution systems, the node requesting content is responsible for selecting the content quality it receives. It will change the content quality it has requested based on the content (or lack thereof) that it receives. Specifically, the device switches between different available qualities based on some measurement of how long it takes to receive content of a given quality (or how long it takes to fill up its internal buffer). This is based on the assumption that the higher the quality, the bigger the content chunks and therefore the longer it takes to download the chunks when the network starts to become saturated.
The device therefore cannot anticipate any fast changing network conditions since it is always in a reactive mode.